


Standing On The Edge Of Forever

by canadianwheatpirates



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Afterlife AU, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Pining, implied suicide, shameless theft of Terry Pratchett's desert, they're all dead but it kicks off with Root's death so take care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-07 22:53:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17969591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canadianwheatpirates/pseuds/canadianwheatpirates
Summary: "His eyes – for want of a better term; blue pinpricks seated in the depths of black eye sockets – meet hers and he shrugs, pulling an hourglass out of his robe. It’s simple yet elegant, the frame wrought from black gunmetal, and in an empty heartbeat she knows that it’s Shaw’s. He taps it thoughtfully."Root waits for Shaw on the other side.





	Standing On The Edge Of Forever

**Author's Note:**

> This was one of the first POI fics I started writing, it just took [checks watch] a bunch of time to finish. Title from Grand Canyon by Puscifer, fic inspired by a line from This Side of Paradise by Hayley Kiyoko (playing poker with the dead).

 

The sirens are loud, so fucking loud, as the EMT flits around the ambulance. Root wishes he would just stop; she’s beyond gone, and they both know it. Maybe pointless optimism is a facet of both their jobs.

“Can you hear me?” she gasps out, the words rattling across the blood in the her lungs.

_ Absolutely _ , She replies, and Root manages a smile. The EMT has stopped, staring at her, but she doesn’t care. She opens her mouth to speak again, but The Machine stops her.  _ Rest _ , she says.  _ I will look after the others. _

Her eyes slide shut for a moment. When she opens them, a second figure has appeared behind the EMT; she follows the hem of a black robe up, up until she’s staring into a skull.

ROOT, he says, and the sound echoes off the air itself. The ambulance falls away, replaced with a black desert that stretches as far as she can see. 

“So you’re Death, then.”

Above them the sky is huge, starless; it blends seamlessly into the desert where they meet at the horizon. In the distance, the darkness crumples into a silhouette of a mountain range.

“Is this it?”

NO. IT IS AN IN-BETWEEN.

She raises an eyebrow. “The afterlife has a waiting room?”

OF A SORT. THE REST IS BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS.

She glances at the remote mountains, and her past cry of  _ I’m not leaving you again _ seems to echo through the still air. Setting her jaw, she looks back up at Death; defiance is written in every line of her face.

“Not without Shaw,” she says, and her voice cracks. His eyes – for want of a better term; blue pinpricks seated in the depths of black eye sockets – meet hers and he shrugs, pulling an hourglass out of his robe. It’s simple yet elegant, the frame wrought from black gunmetal, and in an empty heartbeat she knows that it’s Shaw’s. He taps it thoughtfully.

SHE MAY BE SOME TIME, he says. The hourglass is still half-full.

“Suppose that’s a good thing.”

The silence that falls is somehow deeper on her right side. She snaps her fingers and her suspicions are confirmed. 

“I’m still deaf,” she says to no-one in particular.

IS IT NOT A PART OF YOU? he says.

“So was She,” she murmurs.

He nods, once, and stalks past her.  She watches him go, fading slowly to nothing, and a scream claws at the back of her throat. 

 

There’s a rock by her foot. It’s small but sharp looking, like she could cut herself on it — if that’s even possible any more.

She picks it up, tosses it into the air and catches it again. It reminds her of a story she’d heard once in an undergrad computer science class, one she’d snuck into tailing a hit target; the lecturer had been going on about how, with enough time and space and stones, you could simulate a universe.

Maybe, if she has long enough, she can make a better one.

 

There’s only one rock, it turns out. She’s taken to throwing it away from the mountains, walking over to it and picking it up, throwing it again. Every throw takes her further away from her destination; every throw brings her closer — in time, if not in space — to Shaw.

Voices filter down to her through the still air. She turns to hear them better and recognises the rumble of one of them; a little way off, John is in grim conversation with Death. 

He looks a little surprised as she wanders over. Death nods to them both and swings himself up onto his horse.

“Hey,” she says. Where do you start when you’re greeting someone in the afterlife?

“Hey.”

They stare at each other. She honestly hadn’t been sure who would come next, but it makes sense that it would be John. He’d die for any of them. (Maybe he would even have died for her.)

“So what got you? Famous last stand?”

He smiles crookedly. “Yeah. Cruise missile finished me off. Samaritan escaped up onto a satellite and, well,” he shrugs slightly. “Someone had to send The Machine after it.”

Her fists hit his chest, just like back in the radio studio an age ago now, but this time he folds her into his arms and holds her steady.

“I  _ left _ her,” she growls, and she doesn’t know whether she’s talking about Shaw or The Machine.

He softly grips her shoulders and says, “We’re winning because of you. Shaw is grieving, but she’ll pull through. Harold opened the system; The Machine can fight as hard as she needs to.”

She chokes out a laugh. “The last round of our ASI deathmatch.” 

He nods, and lets her go. She hangs her head for a moment; so much has happened without her. So much has happened  _ because _ of her.

“It sounds like we have some catching up to do,” she says, smiling ruefully.

He reaches into his pockets; after a moment’s searching, he fishes out a deck of cards and a box of matches. Holding them up, he asks, “Poker?”

 

“She took your voice, after you died,” he says.

She drops her cards. He glances down at her abandoned hand — a pair — and quietly reshuffles the deck.

“She…” 

He deals out another hand. “I never really got what was going on with you and her, but she cared about you. You were a part of her.” 

She picks them up and runs her thumb across the edge of one of the cards. It’s an honour to be remembered like that, but one that she can’t make head or tail of. The Machine isn’t meant to have favourites, isn’t meant to value one life over another… 

John doesn’t react when she laughs. Of course, She doesn’t value one life over another — but she isn’t alive any more. He places a hand on the deck, ready to draw, and she nods to him.

 

“Go fish,” John says, but her movement is interrupted by the scuff of sand nearby. Their heads whip around and there’s Harold, as clean-cut and three-piece-suited as the day she’d died. 

“Hello,” he says uncertainly. “I was told you would be here.” He starts to say something else, but it’s muffled by John springing to his feet and engulfing him in a hug. 

“We won,” he when John finally lets him go, and John’s hands clench into fists. 

“Don’t tell me they got you too.”

“No, no. I died… Peacefully.”

Root knows from his tone not to press the issue, sohe changes topic. “John said She’d shut down in the last fight—” desperation bleeds into her voice “— did you get Her back online?” 

“The Machine is back online and apparently fully functional. I believe Ms Shaw is still working with it, though I admit that I lost touch with her and Detective Fusco a few months ago.” There’s a small note of guilt in his voice. 

Root lets out a breath. They’re both okay. 

John chuckles. “They’ll bicker the threats to death.”

Harold smiles wryly. “Indeed.”  He kneels down in the sand beside the cards. “What are we playing?”

 

A bark! rings out across the desert. Excited panting and the skitter of paws on sand follow it as Bear bounds towards them, tongue hanging out. John manages to get up on one knee, only for the dog to bowl him over; he laughs the first real laugh Root has heard from him since they’d died. She crawls over to them and pats Bear as he licks John’s face.

“Good boy,” she mumbles into the fur of his neck. 

Harold crouches down opposite her and they share a smile. “Ms Shaw will have taken good care of him before he came to us.”

“Yeah,” she replies. Bear is the first real indicator of time passing, or perhaps time  _ not  _ passing. John and Harold could have died weeks later, or years, but assuming nothing happened to Bear — which Shaw would make sure of — then it’s taken years for him to pass. 

Years. She stills, a hand wound into Bear’s fur. Years of Shaw, running numbers, saving people, kicking ass. Or maybe not; maybe she finally got bored and wandered off into the world for better adventures.  

Panic rips its way down her bullet scar. What if Shaw’s already dead and crossed the desert without them? She clings closer to Bear, and he wriggles around until she can hug him properly. Shaw wouldn’t just leave him behind; she’d always liked him, and he and Lionel are — were — all that’s left of the old guard. 

She looks up. There are more stars now, enough to pick out the outline of a galaxy. They’re spread out more evenly than the ones she remembers. Of course, the milky way is clustered because of the Earth’s position, flung out on one of the arms; here, the stars radiate out in all directions. 

Her breathing slows as she comes back to the present. As ever, there’s nothing to do but wait. They could play fetch with that rock, in a pinch. 

 

John’s head whips around at the same time as Bear’s, both of them noticing some change in the desert air. There’s a figure in the distance, coming towards them at what seems like a leisurely pace; as it gets closer, she realises it’s Lionel.

“Detective Fucso!” Harold calls to him. 

He waves. “Of course I find you freaks here,” he says once he’s in earshot. “Inseparable even in death, eh?”

“It seems so,” Harold replies.

Root stays quiet as Bear trots up to Lionel. She’d never had much to do with him, though he was important to the others. The nicknames were irritating. Still, she has to credit him for taking everything in stride.

“How’d you die, Lionel?” John asks. Root can’t help but smirk at thought of what might have happened to him.

“I took a buncha bullets for a rookie,” he replies, frowning like he knew what they expected. John’s face falls. Even she has to admit she’s surprised. She’d heard about one or two of his heroics from The Machine, but they’d always seemed at odds with how he was in his day-to-day life.

Harold deals him in, and he plonks down next to her. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I’m waiting for Shaw,” she says. “Y’all just had to go and get killed before her.”

It’s mostly a joke, even if that had been her original intention. In a way, she’s grateful to have the rest of the team with her, though it drags out how long she has to wait for Shaw. 

“Eh, she’s bulletproof, whaddya gonna do?” Lionel jokes back at her. She laughs, and picks up her cards.

 

“This is the afterlife huh?” Shaw’s voice cuts across the quiet like her favourite knife. Root is on her feet before she knows it, slamming into Shaw and hugging her. To her credit, Shaw tolerates it; eventually, she pokes Root in the ribs until she lets her go.

“Hey,” Root says, her voice shaking.

“It’s good to see you,” John adds, and Harold nods.

“What finally took you out? Nuclear strike?” Lionel asks jokingly.

Shaw smirks at that, then replies, “Heart attack. Felt it coming, but I figured that going out quietly was a privilege.”

Root catches John’s eye. She can’t say she’d make the same decision, but they both understand it; sometimes you get tired of outrunning bullets.

“The machine gave me a message for you,” Shaw continues, and Root turns back to her. She clears her throat. “She says that she’ll remember all of us.”

“If one person remembers you, then maybe you never really die,” answers Harold quietly. The others turn to him, and he adds, “It was one of the last things The Machine said to me before she went offline in the last battle.”

They all fall quiet, pondering. The thought that The Machine will remember her makes her heart ache. Maybe there’s a simulation of her for Her to talk to; maybe she hasn’t abandoned Her in death at all.

“So what now?” Shaw asks.

“Apparently we have to cross the desert.” John says with a small shrug.

She looks around at her assembled friends. “Then let’s go.”

They fall into a loose formation and set off for the distant mountains. Root slips her hand into Shaw’s, and the sky is brilliant with stars.


End file.
